THE BLOVIATED LANGUAGE
(C)1995 Alan M. Schwartz
It was my burden to abide several tens of weeks of the People's
Republic of Canada. (Private research toward cockroach death is
illicit in the USA - the EPA and the War on Drugs assure human
progress is alien to America by law, regulation, and government-
administered physical terror.) This bankrupt socialist paradise
squatting on Arctic North American wasteland is acclaimed for
being Officially bilingual. Every scrap of printed matter is
slathered with side-by-side English and French (except in Quebec,
where millennia of White Protestant European oppression are
rejected through the exclusive articulation of a vulgar French
dialect). If any language is more poorly suited to succinct and
unambiguous information transfer than French, its native speakers
long ago hanged themselves upon a gallows of their own design.
French is a deluge of unpronounced obese suffixes vaguely
questing for meaning amidst a forest of diacritical marks. The
native speakers, abetted by enough diffuse vowels and consonants
to gag a woolly mammoth, need help to pronounce each word exactly
the way it is supposed to sound. Consider three simultaneously
translated passages from the world's great literature:
Red border labels are available in the below listed sizes and
types (12 words, 69 bytes; product made in Quebec)/Les etiquettes
a bordure rouge sont disponibles dans les dimensions et formats
indiques cidessous (14 words, 99 bytes; 43.5% longer).
Crunchy cookie bits in minty milk chocolate (7 words, 43 bytes;
byline of a Hershey Bar)/Morceaux de bisquits croquants dans du
chocolat au lait a saveur de menthe (13 words, 76 bytes; 76.7%
longer).
Letters and postcards may be Registered but cannot be insured (10
words, 62 bytes; Postal Canada)/Les lettres et cartes postales
peuvent etre recommandees, mais ne peuvent pas etre assirees (14
words, 93 bytes; 50.0% longer).
Canada has no silicon chip or circuit board industry worthy of
mention. Given that every electronic component and subassembly
has its maker's mark appended, one can imagine the horror of
Canadian electrical engineers assigned the task of making
everything bigger so the French will fit. I suspect that a
French belch has three syllables and at least a dozen (silent)
letters in its onomatopoeia, plus diacritical marks.
Children throughout Canada, except in Quebec, are expected to be
bilingual. Toward this end they are plunged into "French
immersion" in first or second grade and rapidly achieve
refractory sub-literacy in two languages. Quebec is exempted
from teaching its young English. Quebec instills cultural pride
and profundity within its posterity, at least until they learn
they can dispense with a 12 minute soliloquy for ordering lunch
by saying "Big Mac." Note the absence of diacritical marks.
A most diverting occasion is the oral interface between a proud
Quebecois (might be singular, plural, male, female or some other
sacrosanct semantic fetish, who knows?) upholding the honor of
beautiful French, and a Parisian who really speaks the language -
and stands aurally aghast and culturally outraged. Think of a
chicken brazenly splashed by a spew of dexterously spat tobacco
juice. Now, imagine two chickens juicily splatting each other.
Here in British Columbia, a Francophone arrogantly celebrating
ethnic diversity is apt to be told "Do speak White."
Euro-Disney World is a disaster. Imagine a French public venue
unfouled by hillocks of dog feces. The Happiest Place on Earth
proffers no raison d'etre within French bosoms.
English is the language of business, aviation, computation (the
Internet is American cultural onslaught), and the myriad flavors
of science (sorry, Germany, Beilstein goes to press in English).
If it is important, you can read it in English, possibly before
it is published in its native tongue. French is the exclusive
patois of very small portions of very expensive food, $5 parking
valets, and an indigent Quebec population squawking about rights
and threatening to withdraw from Canada and take their culture
with them. The productive Canadian Provinces would do well to
read "The Ransom of Red Chief" by O. Henry, in English.
The Gauls and their transplanted blight are strangling upon their
own linguistic albatross. The Province of New France, er Quebec,
bestows munificent monetary reward upon the parent(s) of each
Francophone baby born. How provident evolution has been in
denying the haut monde any facile exercise, acceptance, or even
awareness of North American hygienic standards. In a world
bursting with human reproduction despite draconian contraceptive
offensives, Roman Catholic France and Quebec sustain pleasant
annual population declines. Perhaps the instruction books are
written in French, and are replete with elegant discourse
irrelevant to productivity. Either that, or they unconsciously
harbor the same opinion of themselves as held by any and all of
their foreign acquaintances. Mon Dieu! (pronounced exactly the
way it sounds.)